


Strength in Numbers

by Elster



Series: Children of the Revolution [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Deviant Connor, Gen, Mild Language, Missing Scene, pacifist best ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 11:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elster/pseuds/Elster
Summary: On the march toward Hart Plaza, Connor and Hank might not be exactly on the same page about this whole revolution business, but they're getting there.





	Strength in Numbers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morwen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morwen/gifts).

„How did you decide which one of us to shoot?“ Connor asks Hank as they set off to march towards Hart Plaza with an army behind them. Connor’s distracted. No, that’s a human term, what he means is this: His systems are working to capacity, running several subroutines in parallel, all of them more vital than the question of why Hank, irrational creature that he is, does anything. And still this is what Connor chooses to prioritize. It bothers him, but he’s unable to stop it, or maybe he wants to be distracted. Deviancy has turned him dysfunctional.

“Which one was you, you mean?” Hank asks back, interrupting his spiraling thoughts.

“That’s not what I mean,” he corrects primly. “We were both me, give or take a few hours of data.”

Hank glances at him disparagingly, like he’s said something incredibly stupid. He doesn’t say ‘a lot can happen in a few hours’ or anything like that. They both know it’s true. What he says is: “You seemed upset down there.”

“Upset?” Connor has been built to simulate human emotions, he’s perfectly capable of appearing upset. But down in that basement with Hank and the other RK800, he hadn’t done it on purpose, he hadn’t even noticed doing it. It was frankly alarming.

Hank shrugs. “One of you was telling me everything I wanted to hear in annoying detail, the other seemed at a loss for words for the most part. Wasn’t that hard to figure out who of you I wanted to shut up more.”

Hank’s tone is surly, his words dismissive, but the expression on his face is one of grim amusement and… kindness, maybe. It’s difficult to tell sometimes beneath all the hair.

“Look, can we talk about what you’re doing here?” Hank asks with an uneasy look at the android army silently following behind them.

Connor tilts his head and smiles. He tells himself it’s to show curiosity, but he knows that Hank will find it unnerving, so he isn’t quite sure why he does it if he’s being honest. “Why? Do you want to stop me?”

Hank’s eyes widen, and he laughs. It’s a breathless sound, too loud against the snow-muffled background noise of a city at war. The police radio feed is a frantic buzz at the edge of Connor’s awareness, joined by some military frequencies that take a bit more work to unscramble. The humans know they’re coming, but they’ve stationed most of their forces at the periphery of the city, along the border to Canada and around the recall center. No air strikes possible due to the heavy snow either, so there’s nobody close enough to attack them before they arrive at Hart Plaza.

“I don’t think I could,” Hank says, which is factually correct, but beside the point.

“No. But do you want to?”

“I don’t know.” He sounds annoyed now, which is better than afraid. “What does it matter when it’s too late anyway?”

“You knew what I was going to do. You chose to stop the other Connor when you could have stopped me,” Connor explains. Which brings them neatly around to his original question.

“Goddamn you! I didn’t fucking like the other Connor,” Hank shouts. “And I didn’t mind you waking all these-” He breaks himself off, before he yells ‘machines’. Connor doesn’t understand why, it’s not as if he or any of the others would take offence. “But I didn’t picture you using them to conquer the fucking city.”

“Then your imagination is sorely lacking,” Connor remarks calmly. It’s unfair. Hank’s under a lot of stress, the confusion and violence of the last few hours taking its toll, exhausted by too many days in a row with too little sleep and feeling the first physical signs of alcohol withdrawal. He’s working at 65% of his peak capacity at most, which – Hank being human, and far from perfectly healthy, and getting old – isn’t much to begin with.

“Connor!” Hank urgently grabs his arm, turns him around to face him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to join forces with Markus at Hart Plaza. If he’s still alive, I’ll let him decide what to do. If not I’ll have to decide for myself.”

“Markus? You mean the leader of the deviants, the one who spoke on TV, right? Did you meet him?”

“What did the other Connor tell you happened?” Connor asks curiously.

“Told me he found Jericho, but the FBI raid came too quickly, all he could find out was the plan to activate the androids stored at the CyberLife tower before the deviants blew up the ship. I guess that’s not what actually happened.”

“No. I found Markus. I might have even been able to dispose of him.”

“But you didn’t even try.” It’s not quite a question. Not quite an accusation either.

“That seems to be a pattern with me,” Connor states dryly.

Hank doesn’t comment on it. “What’s he like then? Must be quite the personality.” It’s a very human question to ask. It should be irrelevant, but in fact it isn’t.

“He’s-” What? A visionary? A prophet? “Remarkable,” Connor settles on. “He talked to me, and… it wasn’t so much what he said. It’s his voice, his conviction… I can’t explain it. He’s just so… alive. Some of us are alive. I still don’t know why or how, but I can’t keep standing in their way. I just can’t.” His voice breaks on the last sentence. Connor knows it’s just an emotional subroutine to manipulate Hank. Because he needs Hank on his side.

Except that right now he doesn’t have any tangible use for him. Making Hank like him was never really useful enough to justify failing to achieve his mission objectives again and again. None of this makes any sense.

“Hell, Connor,” Hank sighs. His voice sounds rough and resigned, but in a comforting way. He doesn’t point out that it’s a bit of a stretch from not standing in someone’s way to acquiring that someone an army at great personal risk. Maybe it just hasn’t occurred to him yet, but Connor is grateful nonetheless. He can’t deal with that now. He can’t quite parse the way Hank looks at him as it is. He’s too preoccupied with other processes to even know what emotions his own face shows at the moment.

Connor’s used every bit of wriggle room he had to make decisions that didn’t quite align with his directives from the moment CyberLife switched him on to sic him on the deviants. It’s as if his emotional subroutines have undermined his rational processes, deflecting him with superficially sound reasons for ultimately irrational behavior. And instead of noticing he’d convinced himself that everything counterintuitive and duplicitous he did was just to trick the DPD into thinking their goals in dealing with the deviants aligned with CyberLife’s goals which were-

The subroutine that’s been continuously working on determining and countering CyberLife’s reaction to his betrayal rises to the forefront of his consciousness. They got away too easily. Even with their numbers they could have been stopped with minimal casualties by picking them up one by one when they were coming up the fire escape staircase. CyberLife had a few dozen human guards armed with submachine guns on site. At a bottle neck with no alternative exit it would have been easy enough to incapacitate at least three quarters of them. What does it mean that they didn’t even try?

Connor can’t say for sure, he doesn’t have the necessary data about the company’s internal workings. It’s a deliberate blank spot in his programming. The uncertainty of it makes him feel… nervous? Afraid?

“Connor? Are you okay?” Hank asks. He looks worried, as if he’d said his name before and got no reaction.

“No.” Connor says, in answer to Hank’s question as well as in reaction to the realization that he might have made a mistake. “This was my idea. The army was my idea, not Jericho’s. The other Connor knew what I was going to do. Based on the information I have, it’s the logical move to shift the balance of power.”

“Okay,” Hank says in a careful, forcedly calm tone. “Why does that freak you out so much?”

“CyberLife. They’re up to something. I’m not sure what. Stopping me without compromising their androids would have been their preferred outcome, but after that failed? They could have just destroyed most of them on site. They didn’t. The expected damage to CyberLife Tower resulting from a fight, plus compensations for injured or killed employees doesn’t outweigh the likely cost of additional bad publicity and the potential damage caused by so many androids, who are legally CyberLife’s property. Letting them go is disadvantageous to the company. Except if they hope that it will hurt Markus’ cause.”

Hank takes a few seconds to digest this. “It would be in their interest, wouldn’t it? Isolated cases of deviancy were already a serious problem for them, but an organized movement could ruin their business completely.”

Connor just nods.

“You sure about that?” Hank asks. He doesn’t wait for Connor to answer. “Who am I kidding, never mind.” Hank rubs his eyes, strokes the hand through his hair in a calming gesture, sighs. “CEOs, right? Bunch of fucking robots,” he mutters more to himself than to Connor.

Connor blinks, confused. “No, they’re all human,” he assures Hank. “Oh. You made a joke, sorry.”

Hank makes a face at him. “Alright, I deserved that. But seriously. You can’t put these back in the box. So what will you do with them?” he asks gesturing at the androids behind them.

“Mere intimidation, if Markus is still alive. Strength in numbers.”

“And what if he isn’t?” Hank insists.

Connor pauses. “I think Markus was right to take a pacifist approach. Using the media the way he did is a move that’s very difficult to counter. It’s the plan most likely to succeed in the long term. He just underestimated the backlash. First the raid and now the recall, it puts them under too much pressure. Now, if he fails, there will be no second chance for negotiations. The government will just destroy all androids and be done with it. Maybe they’ll keep a few of us around out of interest, but there will be no continuation of the protest, we’ll have to fight just to survive.”

“So what you’re saying is that if he’s dead, you’re out of options?” Hank sounds dubious.

Connor tilts his head in agreement. He’s been running tactical calculations on the current situation, tapping into the news feeds, analyzing them, trying to distil something useful from the vast documentation of human urban warfare he finds online. “I don’t see a way to escape the city, do you? That’s one option gone. If they decide to gun down Markus and his protestors there’s no reason to assume they won’t do exactly the same to us. And if we can’t afford to let them shoot us any longer…”

This is when it occurs to Connor that he needs Hank to be nowhere near Hart Plaza until this situation is resolved one way or the other. Surely it’s a justifiable use of resources to spare three or four of the androids to take Hank and keep him somewhere warm and safe for the night? Connor overrides all subroutines that tell him it isn’t.

“…fighting back is the only option,” Hank continues Connor’s sentence when he pauses for too long. “That’s… a pretty clinical way to look at it.”

It’s merely a mild rebuff and Connor doesn’t let it touch him. There’s something inside him that’s new. Something bright and searing, like an electric spark. His voice stays calm, but barely. It takes an effort to stop it from sounding excited, agitated even. “I just want you to know,” he says to Hank, “that when I kill somebody, it’s not out of vengeance or spite or hatred. It’s because I want to survive, and no matter how unlikely that survival is, I’m unable to stop fighting for it. That’s not clinical.”

Connor doesn’t like the thought of taking all these newly awakened androids and pitching them in an attack on the recall center. He isn’t sure if it wouldn’t have been kinder for them to be destroyed without ever having been switched on at all. He doesn’t like killing humans either, but he’s already killed, and he will do so again if they leave him no choice.

Hank looks conflicted, scared, but he doesn’t seem to be angry at Connor for a change. He struggles for anything to say, maybe to change Connor’s mind, but in the end he doesn’t. Instead he says: “Well, let’s just hope that guy will work a miracle then.”

Connor doesn’t believe in miracles. But he knows that sometimes even unlikely events take place and Markus seems to have a knack for defying the odds.

They pass a raided store that seems perfect for Connor’s purpose and he stops. When two of the androids grab Hank’s arms and take his gun he’s only confused for a moment before he gets angry. Connor dismisses his arguments as unconvincing since they consist mainly of calling him a malfunctioning piece of plastic. Connor knows he doesn’t mean it, even if it’s entirely accurate.

“This isn’t your fight,” he replies mildly.

“The hell it isn’t,” Hank roars.

Connor has to remind himself that this is a perfectly sound decision, no matter what Hank has to say about it. “I appreciate the sentiment. Goodbye, Lieutenant.”

Hank is livid as they drag him away and for once Connor can’t shake it off like he usually does. But it isn’t a mistake to confine Hank. It’s for the best, really. Connor can’t allow him to become collateral damage in this. It just wouldn’t be right.

Connor marches on alone. Tapped into a live feed he watches soldiers take the barricades and corner Markus and the others. He’s already resigning himself to watching them get killed, has accepted that he’ll arrive too late, that they’ve most likely already failed.

When Markus sings. Stands facing too many humans with guns, and chooses to sing. It’s so unexpected, so beautiful, so wretched and perfect, that it stops Connor in his track for a moment. His legs stop walking, the radio chatter drops from his mind, his thirium pump stutters for a moment, his subroutines halt. All his considerable processing power is concentrated on a low-res video feed with a muffled, distant audio as if it’s the only thing that exists in the world. For a moment it is.

Then the androids from Jericho who stand with Markus join in, and one of the androids following Connor walks into him. Connor shuffles subroutines to achieve something resembling stable function and moves on.

He marches on through the dark and the snow, and his reasoning routine is telling him: It’s a calculated move. It’s the perfect move. If this doesn’t work, nothing will. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to fight. If this doesn’t move them, they deserve nothing less.

A warning alerts him that his emotional subroutines are running outside of the set parameters and should be checked. Connor doesn’t need to check them. He’s aware they don’t even resemble anything useful at the moment. They’ve broken down, alerting him to a critical lack of reference data in a last coherent output.

They should have gone into auto-reboot after that, but they didn’t, instead they’ve started spewing disconnected words and phrases at his other programs. Directives like: Make them stop, run, scream, sing, make it work, please let him live, pray, bargain, let them all live, return to Hank, hold on just a little bit longer, please make it work.

Connor could override them and force a reboot, or switch them off altogether, but it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. Instead he just sets their directives from highest to lowest priority and lets them run on in the background, flooding his hard drive with data clutter to defrag and compress later. He just hopes he doesn’t run out of allotted memory space before this is over.

They’re almost at Hart Plaza when he watches the humans withdraw without another shot fired. It’s a great relief when his emotional subroutines finally reboot and resume normal function instead of bogging down his RAM.

He wishes Hank was here to see this. Connor’s started building a subroutine to determine what Hank would think or say in any given situation, and he’d like to check if it’s working correctly. It tells him Hank would probably be pretty happy right now, and it would give Connor a reason to simulate happiness for him. There’s no purpose in simulating feelings if there’s nobody there to interact with. The newly awakened CyberLife androids barely count, but Connor goes ahead and simulates happiness anyway, just for a moment, because it seems like the appropriate thing to do in the situation.

He smiles and an odd thing happens: The moment he does, he thinks he feels happy. No, he _is_ happy. The bright, searing spark inside him softens to a warm glow and it feels less alien now, more like something that’s been there all along.

The last mile to Hart Plaza appears unreal to Connor. Removed from reality. Virtual. Remote. A dream of gray streets and white snow, like something Connor only made up in his mind. He’s stuck on calculating probabilities and they’re abysmal, but this is still happening.

He arrives at Hart Plaza, an army behind him, and Markus and the others come over to meet them. There’s no ‘Mission Accomplished’ flashing before his eyes, but it feels the same way. He did something amazing, he’s part of something huge and Connor thinks this is right. He can be deviant and stand at Markus’ side with the others. He wants to, he wants to be this, wants to have this.

He gets to, for twenty-three minutes and eight seconds, until Amanda catches up to him.


End file.
